Psittacism and Dead Language

Not Caring Enough About the Truth To Seek Words That Capture It Exacts a Dreadful Cost in Education

Some of you may be unfamiliar with the word "psittacism"--and the
related words, "psittacine," "psittaceous," and "psittacosis." I
confess that I did not know them until I encountered one in my reading
last summer. The word "psittacism" refers to conduct or behavior
resembling that of a parrot; specifically, using language--talking (and
I would include writing)--without paying the slightest attention to
what you are saying; talking without any understanding, appreciation,
or thoughtfulness about meaning; and making no effort to find words
that do justice to reality and the truth.

Every month, I read hundreds upon hundreds of pages of literature,
materials, and documents in and about education. A great deal of it is
psittaceous. The same words appear over and over again in textbook
after textbook, book after book, article after article, reform document
after reform document, curriculum framework after curriculum framework,
consultant report after consultant report--and it is clear that very
little thought is being applied to their use.

These outpourings are largely useless, because the language in which
they are written is dead. By "dead language," I do not mean ancient
languages such as Latin and Attic Greek that, like all other foreign
languages, are dead most of all in the minds of people who have never
studied them. I mean modern, contemporary language--idioms, jargon,
pseudojargon, cliches--words and phrases used repeatedly and without
reasoned consideration that are inert; powerless to capture reality;
doomed to obscure truth, complexity, and subtlety; and therefore
destined to mislead those who take them as substitutes for thinking.
Dead language is dangerous because it uses up time that needs
desperately to be filled with language that is alive--that conveys and
requires thinking, that is laced with meaning that bears genuinely on
teaching and learning and on the power to affect them for the
better.

Dead language seduces people into believing that they are thinking
when they are not; that they understand when they do not; that they
have come to grips with ideas, with problems, with crises, with
opportunities, with challenges, when they have not. In 1935, Kenneth
Burke wrote in Permanence and Change, his book on symbolic
communication, "One does not hypnotize a man by raising a problem ...
[but] by ringing the bells of his response." By such mutual hypnotism
in what we say and write to each other in education, we become
psittaceous.

I do not mean only barbarisms that are taken for granted in
education and that ring the bells of our response--though they are
symptomatic of a much deeper thoughtlessness that infects our
profession and many others. For example, in the education literature,
everything, it is now said, "impacts" something else. Not "has impact
on," but "impacts." Offensive in both sound and appearance, the word
thus used also conceals all differences in the degree and extent of
cause and effect and correlation.

Stop to consider: My words today may have impact on you, but then
again, they might do much less than that without being entirely
impotent--they might influence you a bit; they might give you a
moment's thought; they might make you feel somewhat offended; a few
might stick in your minds, or they might be quickly forgotten. They
will have impact--major and consequential effect--on some. But in the
literature of education today, it's all "impact"--as if the world of
education were made up entirely and exclusively of locomotives
colliding head-on at high speed. To say that something "impacts"
something else reveals nothing about reality in any of its complex
subtlety; it obscures reality. But now in education, this tired word
"rings the bells of our response."

You know the sort of thing I mean: Take, for another example,
fashionable uses of the word "style," as in "learning style" or
"teaching style." If ever phrases were dead, they are these. They
convey nothing of the ways in which people learn or teach--and fail to
learn and teach. They say nothing of the differences between learning,
say, by experience, from experience, and through
experience (as though prepositions did not differ in meaning). Whether
people observe well or badly, experiment well or badly, reflect well or
badly, interpret and draw analogies well or badly is no matter of
style. "Style" says nothing of the substance of the myriad ways in
which intelligence can be effectively cultivated and applied (or not)
within the rich domains of systematic study and experimental discovery.
But, dead to accomplish anything else, the phrase "learning style"
"rings the bells of our response" as if it explained something.
It doesn't. It manages only to breed psittacism. It generates nothing
except mimicry of itself. The authors of theories of multiple
intelligence, along with everyone else who pays attention to what words
mean, rightly bemoan and dissociate themselves from the deadliness and
distortion of the language of "styles." And they should, because how we
learn and teach runs to the very core of who we are and how we think of
other people--it is nothing so shallow as mere "style."

The death of ideas is not embodied only in single words or phrases
whose fashionability gives us excuses not to think, not to seek to
learn, not to recognize challenge. Consider the deadliness of the
following description of the purposes of education reform from a report
by an influential coalition of Massachusetts business leaders:

"To help students develop the critical thinking,
problem-solving, reasoning, collaborative, and inquiry skills called
for in the Frameworks, teachers also need professional development on
instructional strategies, interdisciplinary teaching, school-to-work,
making connections between disciplines, using technology, parental
involvement, peer coaching, and alternative forms of
assessment.

"School administrators need training in ... managing change
... and working with the external environment as well as curriculum
leadership ... and alternative ways to provide structured learning
time."

The business group did not invent this language. They borrowed it
from the education literature in the state. Listen again to the first
words: "To help students develop the critical thinking,
problem-solving, reasoning, collaborative, and inquiry skills called
for in the Frameworks." Would anyone who knows what logic is, who
understands reasoned inquiry, believe that what we have here is a list
of genuine intellectual achievements? Why would anyone begin a list
with critical thinking and then later drop in reasoning, as if they
were somehow separate intellectual powers? Would anyone who understands
the intimate web of subject-matter knowledge and artistry in teaching
write a sentence which speaks of "professional development on
interdisciplinary teaching" and later in the list refer to "making
connections between disciplines" as if these were divisible? Whoever
wrote this paid no attention to substance; it is mere psittacism, in
language so dead it will tolerate any thoughtless list of buzzwords.
Most of the words obscure what teachers need to know if they are to
acquire the depth and the artistry needed to fulfill their
responsibilities to students and to each other.

Just pause for a moment over the empty and dead neologisms
here--"problem solving" and "inquiry skills." Solving problems takes
countless forms, and all of them depend on knowledge and imagination in
recognizing and identifying problems as problems--factual knowledge,
contextual knowledge, and understanding. The locution "problem solving"
manages in practice to obscure all that. So, too, with "inquiry
skills." Learning how to conduct inquiries appropriate to subject
matter is not some skill or other. Being competent in inquiry--whether
in Socratic dialogue, Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics and
calculus, Bernard Bailyn's historiography, or any other disciplined
form of learning and discovery--is not a set of "skills," but rather
depends on the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of content by
systematic study. Psittacism and dead language conceal all that.

What about the description of the "training" school administrators
need, to live up to the trust of responsible office? I've been an
education administrator for 16 years, half of my academic and
professional life. I serve on the boards of a multinational chemical
corporation and several colleges and independent schools. I've chaired
federal boards and serve as an adviser to the U.S. departments of
Justice and Education. In all these venues, I've never in my life, to
speak in the dead language offered, "managed change"--and most of what
I know that is worth knowing about administration and leadership has to
be learned by academic study, imitation, mentorship, and the wise
counsel of friends. It can't be learned by training.

You show me an administrator who is "trained in ... working
with curriculum leadership," rather than educated in the design of
intellectually sound curriculum by grade level and subject-matter
content, and I'll show you an administrator who is both incompetent and
dangerous. Show me an administrator trained in "alternative ways to
provide structured learning time," but not educated in the fundamental
necessity for, and means of, focusing the daily work of teachers and
students on study in the academic and scientific disciplines, and I'll
show you an administrator who will contribute to the dismal state of
schooling. Language that is dead obscures fact, obscures
history, obscures problems, obscures what needs to be
learned and to be done; dead language succeeds only in "ringing the
bells of response" among its devotees.

One more illustration of the uses of dead language in education and
education reform. Try the word "develop," as it appears in the pages of
"The Massachusetts Common Core of Learning." This document, prepared by
the state department of education, is supposed to be the heart of
education reform here. In its first 12 pages alone, the text tells us
we should "develop solutions," "develop conclusions," "understand the
development of English," "understand the process by which individuals
and groups develop," "develop skills," "develop informed opinions,"
"develop ... curriculum frameworks," "develop student performance
standards ... and state assessments." References are made to
"curriculum development," "professional development," "inspiring ...
development," "developing a sense of belonging and commitment,"
"developing new interests," "developing an action plan," "developing
classroom assessments," "developing portfolios," "developing
interdisciplinary instruction," "developing a three-year plan,"
"conversations that develop," "practices [that] develop desire,"
"developing wisdom, compassion, and intellectual breadth," and
"developing habits of mind."

There's enough "development" here to open a photographer's studio.
But for educational purposes, the language is utterly dead. The word
"development" has become an impoverished substitute for clear
expression that precisely and accurately describes and refers to real
activities, achievements, and procedures; its constant use has driven
out awareness of the need for language that is alive with descriptive
and explanatory power. The language of "development" resembles a
"dead-heading" tractor trailer: a truck that is empty, carrying no
freight, doing nothing except consuming fuel and money to get from
point A to point B--the bane of cost-effectiveness for any freight
hauler.

Just stop and ask yourself what it would take to replace
"development" in its endless appearances with words that would
accurately say what it is that we or our students are to do or to
understand in each case. In the Common Core, the word "development"
obscures the need for thinking about what we mean, what we need to
know, what it is incumbent on us to do. A perfectly good
word--"develop"--has been used to death by failure to think, and is now
as deadly to thought as a vacuum is to breath.

Overuse of a word like "development"--whether from laziness,
intellectual indolence, psittaceous mimicry, or not caring enough about
the truth to seek words that capture it--exacts a dreadful cost in
education. A phrase such as "professional development" invites the
proliferation by school systems of episodic, one-day, quick-fix,
faddish, release-time inservice days for teachers. Because the phrase
illuminates nothing, it permits everything. If administrators and
teachers resisted such dead language in favor of a phrase such as
"sustained faculty study programs," they would be reminded of the
purpose--and therefore the nature--of inservice work that is worthy of
its name. Dead language kills educational opportunity in a
profession.

Dead language gives comfort to intellectual passivity, and it
therefore destroys instructive challenge--but instructive challenge is
what education is supposed to offer.

What are the capacities that we must bring to life in ourselves if
that yearning is to find fulfillment in our studies, in our daily work?
One of my colleagues has kindly brought to my attention a reply to that
question written by Richard Ohman in his 1976 book, English in
America: A Radical View of the Profession. The capacities we need
in order to achieve serious learning in challenging matters, Mr. Ohman
writes, include:

"[T]hose for noticing, responding, seeing consequences, making
associations, imagining, being fair, seeing objections, trying models
and hypotheses, interpreting, getting at assumptions, testing against
moral principle, structuring, remembering, analyzing, seeing X as Y,
etc. A ripening of these capacities is much of what we mean by
education, for a student in whom they are well developed has great
mobility in any intellectual situation. We value his theme in part
because we like a skilled performance, but mainly because we see behind
the performance his powers of invention, his mobility, his control over
experience, his ability to extend and qualify his initial observations.
Out of whatever he is given he makes more. He stands in an active
relationship to circumstances and events.

"The student whose invention is weak, by contrast, cannot write a
good theme no matter how orderly his methods of composition. The
external world is inert before him and, consequently, so is whatever
discourse he reads. He has a small repertory of moves to make when
confronted by an obstacle to understanding--indeed, he is unlikely to
notice that there is a difficulty, or to be able to isolate it if he
does smell trouble."

You will have a benchmark of your own progress in the study of
education if you think about these capacities as you talk, listen,
read, and write. They are the capacities that prohibit our being
hypnotized by psittaceous and dead language.

By
Edwin J. Delattre

Edwin J. Delattre, a professor of philosophy, is the
dean of the school of education at Boston University.
This essay is adapted from his remarks to entering
graduate students last fall.